Truth

I hide the truth every day. We all do – otherwise no-one would be polite, and few of us would smile. So when you say those frightening words, “truth game”, I feel myself go tense.

You start with an easy question. Or so you think. “Ever shoplifted?” But will the answer, my emphatic no, announce me as boring, conventional, averse to risk, or far, far too law-abiding to be interesting? I’m worrying about it as soon as I’ve answered the question.

We move on. As the evening passes, things go deeper. We’re talking about loss and fear and regret. There are questions I’m longing to ask about these things – things I’m wondering if I could say. But I don’t. I don’t dare.

Tonight I’m faced with truths of my own. I’m thinking of small betrayals against a canvas of pain and fear. I’m annoyed with myself for dwelling on these things, and even how often I’m typing the word “I” points it up. Why am I thinking – agonising – about these things when there are so many real problems worth worrying about? Things I could do… important things, worthwhile things?

Truth? My truth tonight is a mean and petty one. It’s a truth game of emptiness and blankness. I’m staring into space and wondering how I got here. I’m hating myself for being so introspective. I’m hurting because of something someone’s said. I’m wishing I didn’t take things so much to heart, and that friends or partners were able to speak to me without me analysing their words until they’re empty shells, so that a careless implied criticism doesn’t become a mood-altering event.

The truth – in its realest form – is not something I tell very often. My truth is the sort of slow, sad song you listen to at three o’clock in the morning when the last bottle of wine is empty and the candle is burning down, and the people who called around to drink and talk have packed up their words and gone home. During the day I am professedly honest, telling people how it is, avoiding the truism or what people want to hear, though trying hard to be tactful. But my real truth? My real truth is that slow, quiet song, or the alienation of walking alone through the streets of a city faraway from home, where you don’t know anyone and you don’t speak the language. It is the silence of the tiniest lapping waves of a calm sea late at night, reflecting fairylights in the almost imperceptible breakers after all the holidaymakers have gone home for the night, and the cries of the revellers down at the harbour bar can only just be heard.

If truth is a game, then it has to be a game with rules. My rule is that I hide my deepest truth because I like to make people smile. It’s like the thick, comforting scarf wrapped high about the throat against the winter north winds. Protective tact mixed with the childish desire to please, to be accepted, to imagine that a laugh or smile equates with being liked. Any transgression of this rule and the emptiness beneath it all might be exposed like the bones beneath the skin, overexposed like when the camera flash drains out the colour and reveals the blanked-out emptiness behind the eyes. My truth game is played to time, and when it ends for the day I am left in the peace of the darkness, open-eyed, considering it all and trying to work out what it means. I am working out the score as I try to memorise the rules… did you win? Did anyone? Is there a victory of truth, or is victory itself a lie?

Behind every drawn curtain lies a truth. Finding it is the risk we have to take – gazing across the cut grass and the tide-smoothed sand and into the eyes of the people we know. The risk of the game, like any other game, lies in injury – will we get hurt by telling our real truths, or will the truths that others tell us hurt them, hurt us?

Your truth game is your weapon – your incision into the mind. Your questions and your perceptiveness cut through the protective abstractions, the laughter and the surfaces. You win the game of hunting truth and trapping it, trembling, inadequate, in a corner. But the next day my truth begins to camouflage itself again, to straighten its shoulders and stiffen its back, to carry on. The smile returns and the hiding starts again.

We go on with the game.

24^th June 2007.